While this is true, I fail to see how this should be considered an end-user 'advantage' of the supposedly 'free and open' nature of Android.
To me, it seems a hell of a lot more user-friendly and convenient to have everything in one place, to have a single, safe payment system, to get all updates from the same place and not having to deal with untrusted APK's or application and app store incompatibilities.

Right now, all I can think of that is left of the Android 'free and open' model is that you can lobotimize your device by installing unverified APK's (like you can on an jailbroken iOS device), or flash a custom ROM (which you usually only do because the carrier screwed up the stock ROM with bloatware, crapware and adware).
For anything else, you'll have to use what Google wants you to use, otherwise your device can not actually be called 'Android', it will not have...

iOS uses a HFS+ variant, just like OS X, which you could call proprietary, but it's well known and documented, and supported by many programs and operating systems not made by Apple. None of this has anything to do with why there is no manual filesystem management or an SD slot on iOS devices anyway. There is no direct/manual filesystem access in iOS, because it doesn't fit the storage paradigm iOS uses, which is that applications live in their own sandbox, and in general...

I think right now, the general consensus is that the limit is somewhere between 8 and 10 nm, but before we get there, lots and lots and lots of things need to be sorted out, as we've more or less reached the point where the box of tricks that allows us to use deep UV light (which has a wavelength of about 190 nm) to print features at the current nodes (which are 22 and 28 nm) is almost exhausted. The fact that all of this even works and makes chips that actually work is...

I second that. The technology to profitably mass-produce chips at smaller feature sizes than 22 nm simply does not exist yet. It's all still experimental. That Intel is even managing to produce at 22 nm can almost be called a miracle (and considering these delays, apparently they aren't actually managing it all that well, at least not yet). Source: my employer, who makes about 80% of the optical lithography gear used by foundries and chip manufacturers around the world,...

Actually, full screen apps integrate very nicely with Mission Control, as they will all get their own desktop space. This allows you to have multiple full-screen apps open and still be able to switch between them without reverting to windowed mode, and you can keep your own desktop spaces organized for non-fullscreen apps. I cannot really think of a better way to have multiple desktops, windowed applications and full-screen applications all at the same time. When I'm...

Mission Control replaces Spaces, Dashboard provides widgets, and Launchpad is sort of like the many third-party quick-launch tools such as QuickSilver. They all have different purposes.Personally, I wouldn't qualify the collection of task/widget/workspace management functions in OS X as 'a big mess'. When Launchpad was added I dismissed it as a clunky, unnecessary toy-tool that I would never use instead of QuickSilver, but since I've bought the magic trackpad, I use it all...

Source for this please? NVidia PR don't count.The Tranformer Prime benchmarks I've seen were nowhere near 3x faster than Tegra 2, in fact, clock for clock, Tegra 3 was *slower* than Tegra 2 for single threaded tasks.I fail to see how Audi using Tegra 3 says anything about how good it is. Just that the NVidia PR department did a good job once again. Looks like they fooled you as well, which you could say is surprising, since what I've been seeing is an exact replay of what...

For embedded GPU's dedicated VRAM is much less required, since apart from the Tegra GPU's, all of them use tile-based rendering. This means there is no Z-buffer, and the framebuffer is always written in tiles, allowing for very efficient caching, and all rendering operations are done to on-chip tile memory that is orders of magnitude faster than e.g. DDR5 memory. In general, you can't really extrapolate anything you know about desktop GPU's to mobile GPU's because they are...

The Tegra 3 that is in the Transformer Prime is _the_ reason I'd rather see a higher-clocked A5 with a better GPU and more RAM, than an A6 quadcore part that's comparable with Tegra 3.
Looking at early benchmark, Tegra 3 doesn't even scale linearly in clock speed, ie: a 1.4 Ghz Tegra 3 is less than 40% faster than a 1.0 Ghz Tegra 2. The GPU in the Tegra 3 is not even faster than the one in the Apple A5.
So rather than being first-to-market (ie: the NVidia strategy) with...